Week 1 has passed and we’re into the quarter full-swing. This quarter I’m taking Arabic, the first section of Middle East historiography that focuses on the Ottoman Empire from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Historical Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire), and Historical Studies of Women and Gender. Both the Middle East course and the women and gender course have great syllabi that I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

I’ve also been assigned an undergraduate class for which I’m going to be grading the midterm and final; as of last count, the class had about 75 students, but will probably whittle down to around 50. The class is outside my major field, and covers Mexico in the 19th century from decolonization to revolution (1810-1910). For it being an immediate neighbor to the south, I unfortunately know very little about Mexican history and am looking forward to learning more.

Bender, Thomas. “Historians, the Nation, and the Plentitude of Narratives.” In Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: UC Press, 2002, 1-22.Chang, Kornel. “Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880-1910.” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 678-701.

Kelley, Robin D. G. “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-mapping of U.S. History.” In Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: UC Press, 2002, 123-147.

Smallwood, Stephanie. “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic.” The William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 4 (2007): 679-716.

Miscellaneous
One of the graduate students in our program is coordinating an Arabic coffee hour where a group of us choose a reading in Arabic, translate it, and then meet to go over our translation. I’ve chosen our first reading from a 1926 issue of a magazine I found when I did research at the Smithsonian for my thesis: الجديدة المرأة (The New Woman). The article is المرأة التركية الجديدة (“The Turkish New Woman”) by Halide Edib. It should be fun.

This is a first for the term so far: I’m getting out my reading list before the week I tackle it, rather than after. I’m thinking some congratulations are due to myself. Two of my classes aren’t meeting this week (one reason I have time to post this now), and we’re reviewing preliminary prospectuses (i?) for another, so, all in all, a lighter reading week. With my abundant “free time”, I hope to do some significant catch-up and maybe even some getting ahead. So, without further ado, this week’s reading list: